Outback Husband

She wondered again about him as she made up the bed. She didn’t know what to make of him. He had seemed so taciturn and hostile at first, but he was so different when he played with the children, and Natalie had made him sound like a different man again. It was odd, Juliet thought idly, how clearly she could picture him already, almost as if she had always known those cool, quiet eyes and that cool, cool mouth.

Smoothing down the bottom sheet, Juliet found herself imagining him lying there, lean and brown and tautly muscled. Her palm tingled, as if she were running her hand over his skin instead, and she swallowed. When Natalie cried ‘Dad!’ she spun round as if she had been caught in the act itself.

‘Dad, look, we’re making a bed for you!’

‘So I see,’ said Cal, but his grey eyes rested on Juliet’s flushed face, and he raised one eyebrow at her guilty expression. She was sure that he could see exactly what she had been thinking about.

‘We…I just thought…since you weren’t here…’ Juliet realised that she was floundering and forced herself to stop. This was her house and she had a perfect right to be here. She didn’t have to explain anything to anyone, least of all to Cal, who was (a) her employee, and (b) late.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Cal coldly, ‘but there was no need. I’ll finish it off.’

Juliet felt dismissed. ‘I’ve…er, I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do about eating, but I’ve made supper if you’d like to eat later,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Thank you.’

He didn’t say ‘you may go’, but that was what it felt like. He stepped out of the doorway and Juliet sidled past him and slunk back down to the kitchen. Behind her, she could hear Natalie excitedly telling him about Kit’s bedtime story, and how Andrew had splashed in the bath, and she felt a great wash of loneliness sweep through her. She had no one to tell about her day. How long was it since she had had anyone to talk to in the evenings?

A long time.

She had hoped that she would have been able to make some friends amongst her neighbours after Hugo had died, but everyone lived so far away, and she soon discovered that he had left her a legacy of distrust and disapproval. On the few occasions she had made the laborious journey to the nearest town, her attempts to be friendly had been met with politeness but no warmth, and she had been too tired and depressed to persevere. Rebuffed, she had retreated into herself, and relied on letters and phone calls to friends in England for support instead. She had told herself that she wasn’t lonely as long as she had the twins, but she had been.

In an effort to cheer herself up, Juliet showered and changed into a cool cotton dress. She had bought it in London years ago, and the deep turquoise colour always made her feel more positive. Kit and Andrew were happy and healthy, she reminded herself, and with Cal as manager she had taken the first step towards saving Wilparilla. That was what mattered.

Her equilibrium restored, she made her way back to the kitchen, where she found Cal looking out through the windows towards the creek. He swung round at the sound of her footsteps and stared at her. Juliet had the oddest feeling that he had forgotten her existence until that moment.

Cal was, in fact, thrown more than he wanted to admit by the sight of Juliet standing in the doorway. The kitchen had been very quiet when he had come in, and he had been standing there, remembering the simple room it been before all the polished wood and gleaming chrome. He had spent long, long evenings alone in here after Sara had died, while Natalie slept down the corridor, torn between his instinct to stay at Wilparilla and the promise he had made to his dead wife.

Now, suddenly, he was no longer alone, and Juliet was there, warm and vibrant in a blue dress, but with that wary look on her face. Irrelevantly, he found himself wondering what she would look like if she relaxed and smiled for a change.

He lifted his hand to show the bottle. ‘I helped myself to a beer. I hope you don’t mind.’ He thought his voice sounded odd, but Juliet didn’t seem to notice anything wrong.

‘Of course not,’ she said, very formal.

There was a pause. ‘Is Natalie in bed?’ she asked at last, and Cal nodded.

‘She’s tired. It’s been a long journey for her.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank you for looking after her. She seems to have had a good time.’

’She was very helpful,’ said Juliet. ‘She’s a nice little girl.’ She would have liked to ask about Natalie’s schooling. Presumably she would do her lessons with the School of the Air. But Juliet suspected that Cal would interpret any questions as criticism, and, since they seemed to be being polite to each other for now, it was a shame to spoil it.

Instead, she went over to the oven and took out the supper. ‘How did you get on with the men?’ she asked as she set it on the table.

Cal pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I think they know who’s boss now,’ he said, grimly remembering the scene in the stockmen’s quarters. He had been down to the stockyards before he went to see them, and had been so angry at the way everything had been neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair that he had been in no mood to make allowances.

‘And who is boss?’ enquired Juliet in a frosty voice as she took a seat opposite him.

‘As far as they’re concerned, I am. As far as I’m concerned, you are.’ Cal met her look evenly. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘Why is it so hard for them to accept that this is my property?’ she asked, disgruntled. ‘Is it because I’m a woman? Because I’m English?’

‘It’s because you don’t know anything about running a cattle station,’ said Cal flatly. ‘You admitted as much yourself. Yes, you’ve got a bit of paper that says you own Wilparilla, but these men aren’t interested in that.’

He nodded his head in the direction of the stockmen’s quarters. ‘They’re only going to work if they know that the person giving them orders understands what they’re doing, and in this case that’s me. Now, you can go down and give them a little lecture on property rights if you like, but you’re paying me to get them organised and get some work done on this station again, and I’ll only be able to do that if they think of me as boss for the time being. If you’re not happy with that, you’d better say so now.’

‘I don’t have very much choice but to be happy with it, do I?’ said Juliet a little bitterly.

Cal just shook his head in exasperation and applied himself to his meal. In a way, he was glad she was being unreasonable. It was much easier to find her irritating, to remember how perversely she was standing in way of all he wanted, than to notice how smooth and warm her skin looked, how her dark hair gleamed in light, how even when her lips were pressed together in a cross line, like now, her mouth hinted at a fiery, passionate nature beneath that brittle cool.

Why was she so obsessed about being boss anyway? She had no idea about Wilparilla. She didn’t know the land. She didn’t know the creeks and gullies the way he did. She had never ridden all day through the heat and the dust, or slept out under the stars while the cattle shifted their feet restlessly in the darkness.

She would never be the boss of Wilparilla, Cal vowed to himself. She didn’t belong on a cattle station. All she knew was this homestead. She probably wouldn’t even recognise a cow if she saw one, he thought contemptuously. Look at her! Sitting there like some exotic bird that had lost its way and found itself in the desert instead of the hot-house environment where it belonged. What was the point of wearing a dress that curved over her breast like that? A dress that let him glimpse the hollows at the base of her throat and made him wonder about the soft material whispering over her skin as she moved?

‘You don’t like me, do you?’ His face didn’t give much away, but Juliet could feel his dislike as clearly as if he had stood up and shouted it.

Cal took a pull of his beer and looked across the table at her. He might have known she would prove to be one of those women who wanted to be up front about their feelings. No, he didn’t like her, but he was damned if he was going to indulge her by admitting it. She would only start asking ‘why not?’ and before they knew what had happened they would be picking over emotions as if any of it mattered.

On the other hand, why should he make things easy for her by denying it? ‘I don’t think this is the right place for you,’ he temporised at last.

‘Why not?’

He had known that was coming! ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ he said, irritated at having fallen into the same old trap. Why did women always have to know the reason? Why couldn’t they just accept things for what they were?

‘Not to me,’ said Juliet, who had hoped to put Cal out of countenance and was annoyed to find that he didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed at being confronted with his hostility.

Cal sighed. Well, if she was so anxious to know what he thought, he would tell her. ‘This is a working cattle station. Life out here is rough and dirty. It’s not a place where you put on a pretty dress and pretend you’ll never have to get mud under your fingernails.’

‘You’ve had a shower and changed your clothes,’ Juliet pointed out, dangerously sweet.

‘Yes, but not into the kind of clothes I’d wear to a smart restaurant.’

‘So I’m not allowed to wear anything but torn jeans and a checked shirt, is that it?’

Cal looked impatient. ‘It’s not a question of allowing,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m just saying that you’re not wearing the right clothes if you want to belong.’

‘But I do belong,’ said Juliet, pushing her plate aside. ‘This is my house,’ she told him deliberately, ‘and I can wear whatever I like in it. I advise you not to forget that.’

The haughty note in her voice made Cal’s lips tighten. It was almost as if she knew how much he hated her reminding him that Wilparilla belonged to her, and was taunting him deliberately. Yes, it had been his choice to sell, but the Laings hadn’t cared for the land. He was the one who had built Wilparilla up into a successful station, and in Cal’s heart it was still his.

Across the table, his eyes met Juliet’s challenging gaze. ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of me forgetting that,’ he said, and his voice was very cold.

They finished the meal in silence, constrained on Juliet’s part, apparently unconcerned on his. Afterwards, she had half expected him to make his excuses and leave, but instead he found a tea-towel and without being asked began to dry the dishes as she washed up.

It was strange for Juliet to have someone to help. She wasn’t used to anyone else being with her in the kitchen. Few people came out to the station, and anyone with business on the station had eaten with the manager and stayed in the stockmen’s quarters. It was certainly quicker with Cal there, but Juliet half wished that he had left her to do it on her own. She was very aware of him standing beside her, not saying anything, looking through the window at the darkness, absorbed in his own thoughts, not caring if she was there or not. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his hands moving, unhurried and competent, and she found herself watching them as if fascinated. They were brown and strong, and there were fine golden hairs at his wrist.

He wasn’t handsome, Juliet told herself. Not handsome in the way Hugo had been, anyway. Really, he was quite ordinary. Brown hair, grey eyes, nothing special.

There was something implacable about him, though. Something hard and strong and steady. A quiet coldness that mesmerised and unnerved her at the same time. Beneath her lashes, Juliet’s eyes rested on his mouth. That wasn’t the mouth of a cold man, she found herself thinking, and she remembered how he had smiled at the twins. The memory snaked down her spine, and something shifted deep inside her so that she jerked her gaze away.

She tried to concentrate on how obvious he had made his distaste, but all she could think about was him lying in the bed she had made, his long brown body bare against the cool sheet. She could imagine it so clearly that she sucked in her breath, and the tiny sound made Cal turn his head to find her eyes wide and dark and startled, as if she had just thought of something shocking.